1.5 Outside-the-Box Solutions

Finally, this
book discusses outside-the-box solutions: what to do about cases in
which you cannot make an individual query fast enough, when treating
the query as a spec for what the application requires at that point,
just tuning that single query, does not solve the problem. This
brings up a class of problems where you really do need to pay some
attention to what the application does, when you cannot just treat it
as an abstract black box that needs a specified set of rows from some
specified tables. Even so, there are some reliable rules of thumb for
the kinds of application-level changes that are likely to solve these
types of problems. You will likely need to work with developers who
know the application details (assuming you do not) to solve these
problems, but by understanding the rules you can still offer valuable
suggestions without application-specific knowledge.